Fatigue

I imagine the rigors of elite level fightin is tough. Combine that with being a person who no longer exists outside X-COM. Finally add in all the strange stuff you see. All this will cause a considerable amount of physical and mental fatigue.

This concept introduces three new bars to the Stats screen:Physical FatiguePsychological FatiguePsychological Damage

Physical fatigue is increased by going on missions. It is reduced by resting between missions, particularily by getting enough sleep. As your physical fatigue gets higher, your stats worsen a little to somewhat. It also increases the rate of psychological fatigue.

In missions your soldiers will use stimulants to counter the effects of physical fatigue for the mission, but that increases physical fatigue afterward. Prolonged stimulant use will also decrease recovery rate.

Facilities based off Alien Medicine increase the reduction of physical fatigue between missions considerably.

If physical fatigue is very high during a mission, the chance for personal injury is very high. These injuries include sprains, fractures, and tendon problems. These injuries can keep soldiers out of the game for weeks.

Psychological fatigue is increased by encountering aliens for the first few times, seeing squadmates killed(a lot if they have worked together for a while), seeing civvies shot, panicking, and in general from combat(moreso at night). HIgh fatigue can reduce some stats(especially bravery and reaction) Psychological fatigue takes longer to reduce. It also increases the rate of phsyical fatigue.

Facilities that use the Aline Entertainment technology can be used to increase the reduction of psychological fatigue considerably.

Psychological damage starts to accumulate when psychological fatigue is high enough. Once psych damage is dealt, it remains forever. As it accumulates, psychological damage can lead to a variety of psychological conditions. What conditions a soldier will get is unknown until they reach that point. I will discuss the variety of possible psych conditions below.

Psychopaths tend not to take moral hits when other soldiers or civvies die. This also means they take no alien prisoners.

Extreme Psychopaths tend to shoot at anything that moves or breathes, including squadmates. They are too dangerous to keep around and are dealt with as you see fit(execution or isolation).

Extreme Xenophobes refuse to use any equipment or ride on any transports based off technology derived from alien technology. This means no plasma, UFOs, Grav guns, adv. lasers. Also, they take no alien prisoners and will spend many turns mauling an alien corpse if they are not in live fire.

Although I like the idea, I fear will put of players, as they would get tired of micromanaging their soldiers.
I would recommend that on easy/beginner difficulty these features could be switched off. But while in hard/superhuman mode, I think this is a great asset, as it would add obstacles to an experienced player.

My doctor says that I have a malformed public duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fiber, and that I am therfore exused from saving Universes.

All this stuff we've been talking about before about feats, fatigue, downtime etc. does appeal to me on some levels, but like others have sited, increased micromanagement, or no means to streamline some micromanaged activities creates tedium.

I still think to discuss implimentation of any of these kinds of things, one has to also examine aspects such as unit templating, stores management/other facility management, R&D & markets, & personell assignments, and whether automation of some of these features (w/an on/off option), could help boost the fun factor a little by minimizing the tedium of the rest of it.

Well, its important to me at any rate as far as getting into the nitty gritty functionality of it all. What's important? What's fun? How into the nitty gritty can I get, and can I turn it on or off? What processes can I streamline and what can't be? etc.

Before you choose which guys board the transport, you could see what their fatigue levels were. As for sleep, that is automatic, as is using alien entertainment or an infirmary for relaxation. Maybe fatigue would be something to scale up/down based on difficulty. Newbies would not want to think about rotating soldiers that go on missions, while more experience players would appreciate when your badass needed to take a break.

I suppose one aspect to fatigue, just to add to the brainstorm a bit, and in terms of functionality...It could work the same way wounded soldiers are handled in the first game. When they're wounded, they're automatically unassignable.

Thinking back a moment to the other thread about auto-quipping troops via the soldiers screen, and dishing out placements aboard ships...Curious to wonder whether you could assign "first trooper pick, second trooper pick, third trooper pick," etc. to the same spot, on the same ship...such that when the first is wounded, fatigued temporariliy or whatever, it draws on your next available soldier pick and auto-assigns them for you.

I'm still going on the assumption here that we'd be able to have several more soldiers than we might have transport space for (or transports for that matter). This way, you'll always have a fresh soldier rotated to the craft for emergency deployment (i.e. you can always count on a full compliment of units to the craft), and if you didn't have to use it during the time your "primary" was unavailable (then does become available), the system would revert to rotating back in your primary when he's fresh.

Granted, there still would be that initial micromanagement hassle of first designating each soldier to be first, second, or third pick for the same transport spot in this situation. Even if the fatigue stuff wasn't in though, I can sort of see the draw to this added aspect of the troop ship placement stuff at any rate.

A call for a small UFO landing goes out. You send out a team of rookies, so your veterans do not get tired. All of them have been training lightly so they have less than five phys fatigue each, no psychological. In the mission two of them die, but it is a success. Since guys died and this was the first alien contact, they got a big psych hit, lets say 25 points. Their phys hit was not huge though.

Now some of the rookies were promoted. They will not recover phys fatigue as fast becasue of the high psycho fatigue. If you take them on a mission again, they get a little more phys fatigue and psycho fatigue, unless a lot of soldiers or civvies die or they encounter new aliens. Right now there phys fatigue is not very high and drops easily. There psycho fatigue is still hovering in the 30s and coming down slowly. The problem here is that if you keep sending them on missions, they could get psycho damage. Also, the physical fatigue will start to dissipate slowly because of the high psycho fatigue. Now your soldier will take a while to recovery to a zone where they perform without risking a blowout.

This is why veterans are important, besides good stats. They have seen it all and are not as phased by deaths and aliens. However you also have to be careful not to tire out your veterans. Sometimes you have to run soldier close to the edge because of alien pressure.

All this is to say, low phys and psycho fatigue should not prevent you from deploying soldiers. Medium is a risk you decide on. High fatigue is asking for injuries or psycho damage.

Again, slightly too complicated and too much mircomanagement.How aout instead of two different kinds of fatigue, we just stick with one type.

Now, fatigue willl be calculated as a function of travel time, length of combat(how many turns), end of combat morale level, and the soldier's stamina. If the result is let's say 70% of the soldier's stamina, he will be automatically removed from the flight roster and the next available garrison soldier will step in.

In the event that there are no/insufficient replacements, the soldiers will be added back to the roster in the order of thier combat experince/rank. We would assume that those with higher ranks didn't hide in the back of the skyranger

in the event that the soldier is forced into combat when he's fatigued(no replacements and/or base attack), he then suffers a 10 - 30% penalty on his TUs and Stamina. Not too drastric to entirely reduce his combat effciency, but enough that the player can notice it.

As to recovery from fatigue status? 12 hours without any combat should fix it nicely, after all, for simplified gameplay, that would be sufficient for a nice long nap and a long chat with the shrink. Maybe soldiers that are on the flight list can't recover because they have to be on standby.

Assuming that V1 allows you to individually assign weapons to soldiers, so that they will already have thier personal weapons, they would then just hope into the plane with thier assigned weapons. So unless you take the time to ensure that you always have a rocket launcher guy aboard, you might end up without a rocket launcer when you need one

i'd go with tzuchans idea. Sounds usable. Although the "untill healed" really would come to the ammount of fatigue he has. Lets say that 10% is recovered for each 5 hours. Or something like that, might vary in difficulty.

Some people say that dreams are a portal to the subconscious. If that is so, I am a very disturbed person.

Now that you mention it, yea it might be better to consolidate all the kinds of fatigue into one fatigue thing. Minimumly I'd expect a couple of days at the base would be enough for them to recover, maybe a week's time at its worst form of severity. Depends I suppose on the challenge if any to keep the transport crews fresh with spares.

About the personal weapons point you made, if you can still have a certain amount of supplimentary cargo space on the transport (despite how everyone is personally outfitted/what they carry with them the rest of the time), I think you can avoid the worry of not having a spare rocket launcher and ammo for it if your "rocket guy" was unavailable just then. Granted, ships ought to still have item limits that make sense to its scale I suppose, yet hopefully personal arms already equipped to the men won't count terribly against that ship's cargo space.

The point of psychological and physical fatigue is that they are different. Physical fatigue was to keep the same guy from fighting 80 hours straight without taking a deep breath. Psychological fatigue was so that guys who keep going into bad situations would experience breakdown over time.

If anything, I would rather get rid of physical fatigue. I want soldiers who keep seeing their squadmates die have psycholgical problems. Psychological damage would be important, espeically since some soldiers would have to take a break or they procede into psychopathy or mental breakdown.

Don't get me wrong, I see the appeal to an extent. One aspect of this I see in relation to this is the practice of hording that good soldier or two. A soldier who consistantly gets into bad situations without someone of higher rank to bolster their resolve or morale etc. can crack after a while, but yet, if they're a survior, they find themselves eventually, in a position of higher rank themselves (they become the focus of morale stability in those below him then, despite what his morale is).

With recruiting an ongoing practice with these sorts of games, if a unit became a risk to his squad he can be replaced easily. Then again, if recruitment in Xeno is anything like the way Apoc's was handled (for argument's sake), then its not so easy (have to wait for desireable candidates to show up in the hiring pool)...Your forced, at least for a time, to make due with that loose cannon.

It seems interesting at least, from a performance issue in battle, being pigeoned holed for a brief period for the sake of filling out that overstretched squad's manpower needs and not quite knowing how they'll perform (whether they're just not that accurate, or maybe a little bit more susceptible to mind/panic attacks from the aliens than normal).

Seeing as this is for post V1, I suggest that in the next version, we implement a simple Fatigue system like what I suggested earlier, and if that works out fine, then perhaps we try add the cumulative effect, ie, soldiers becoming psychopaths is stressed for too long periods...
As to how to implement that, I suggest that psychopath soldiers have really high reaction AND reaction fire at ANYTHING that move/fires during the alien's turn. Even friendlies that have thier own reaction fire triggered.

That way, sending in a full squad of psychopaths and having them on overwatch near each other might result in having one heavily wounded soldier standing.

I also suggest that the psychopaths no longer take morale hits from killed friendlies...

I also suggest that the psychopaths no longer take morale hits from killed friendlies...

Now that does sound interesting. Substitute out one hangup for another with regards to stressed out soldiers. If morale never slams them to any great effect prior to major fatigue setting in, then fatigue ought to step in at some point the longer they're used with no rest. But yea, I'm of the same thinking on this one. If implimented in a future version, all fatigue should just be consolidated to one fatigue stat (or bar, if shown at all that is on the stat page).

I like your thoughts on how it might work too, with Reactions being the trigger for the actions/reactions of aliens, or his own team when the turn is cycled, and having the chance the psycho could attack either one. Its like Bezerking in my mind, only its not preempted by a psionic panic attack to kick it off (though that is a lingering danger nonetheless...fatigued or not). Instead, this form of going mad happens over a longer stretch of time (with little or no downtime for the unit).

For testing purposes prior to any plans of solid implimentation of the rest, I'd suggest the same thing you did tzuchan, and that's keep it simple by making the unit less effective at whatever he was good at (stats weaken slightly) over time, then from there, look into the psycho/longterm bezerking stuff, followed by whatever seems logical in terms of downtime for the trooper to be recovered.

One other thing I find appealing about this, and you touched on too, was the possiblilty, or plausibility on occasion, that you might use a full squad of really fatigued soldiers. It sounds like a fun challenge to use them in some battles of attrition. I mean, if it came down to a 50/50 chance your guys would hit their own people, or the bad guys, I can envision some funky fire fights

Imagine if the aliens had fatigue too. You starve a base of supplies and all their soldiers are tired and hungry. It would create new possibliites in terms of attacking downed UFOs, or disabling ships to come hit later.

Also, I like both your ideas for psychpaths. Psychopaths would essentially just care that someones blood is spilled. Morale is not an issue for them, and its hard to control what little humanity is left.

Besides becoming psychotic, your soldiers could possibly turn into complete pascifists, breakdown mentally, or freak out easily. The point is that you don't know whether you will create Death Incarnate or Nancy No Trigger with lots of stress. Its a risk you have to decide whether to take.

Hmm...
Sir Schwick is right in the sense that we can't have all really fatigue soldiers just going psycho all the time, yet I find the idea of multiple types of disorder with widely varying types of symptoms/effects one that is likely going to be very hard to code. Sounds nice, realistic, but hard to code and prolly heck on gameplay and plenty of micromanagement...

Following the KISS philosophy, here's what I would suggest instead...
There would be three kinds of states for a soldier, normal, psycho and broken. Technically, psycho and broken are actually subsets of mental breakdown, but leaving them as individual status sees good enough. Normal is normal, no explanation is needed here, psycho is like my suggestion in the earlier post. broken however, would mean that the soldier can no longer take it, and is declared mentally unfit for duty.

Now, I'm pretty sure none of you really like the idea of permanantly loosing a potentially high ranked soldier(Hey, if he's having fatigue probs, that means he's been out on the field very often), so we would have to implement a recovery system. My suggestion for this is that for a period of time(randomly selected, but suggested period be approx one game time week, maybe longer but no more than a month), a broken soldier is treated like he was wounded, and is thus recuperating in base. During a base defence mission, he will be evacuated with the civies. After this period, he can go back on active duty, BUT he will take a stats hit. That is to say, he's stats will fall to anyway between back to original rookie stat or loosing half of his gained stats. Sounds just as bad as loosing him permanantly right? But what if he "recovers" the lost stats at three to four time the speed at which rookies improve? Think of it as getting back in the saddle.

Also, pyschos can undergo the recovery process as well. In thier case, the player chooses whether to have the soldier undergo the recovery process. Also, psycho soldiers don't take the stats hit that broken soldiers do. After all, they are still happy to kill things... Just have the original restraint of looking before shooting...

Because of this, soldiers that go psycho should be rare, maybe one out of every seven soldier that fails the sanity test... This way, the player won't actively fatigue every soldier in the hopes of getting psychos, which would prolly unbalance the game.

After this period, he can go back on active duty, BUT he will take a stats hit. That is to say, he's stats will fall to anyway between back to original rookie stat or loosing half of his gained stats. Sounds just as bad as loosing him permanantly right? But what if he "recovers" the lost stats at three to four time the speed at which rookies improve? Think of it as getting back in the saddle.

Not too shabby...Time for the broken to get healed, yet also some time to get his courage (i.e. lost "statage") back. The psychos would probably only ever take a stat hit yet remain open to you to keep active if you chose unlike the broken.

I would have to differ though on how they'd perform with relation to your thought that too many psycho soldiers would unbalance the game. I figure as long as when in that state, its an even odds thing that they could hurt themselves, his team, or the aliens, it shouldn't be unbalanced.

I put in that third option just now (the chance of them hurting themselves thing) just as a lark. Perhaps this can be the safety net, such that it is, for only putting the psychos at risk in the field while your "ok" ones are back at the ship. If they can hurt themselves among those other odds above (team attack or alien attack), they then don't seem to be best left to their own devices, at least not for long periods on duty.

I don't think mental breakdowns should recover. You would have had plenty of warnings that your soldier needed some rest and not be pushed. Pushing soldiers is a risk you take, and the price is posssibly losing a soldier to mental breakdown. I also think there should be a couple steps between normal and breakdown. That is when you have 'psychos' and 'spooked' soldiers. You can let the psychos still play, but knowing they will snap too easily.

Too be honest, the specifics of long term fatigue effects(lumping mental and physical together), whether or not they should be able to recover, implementation of multiple type of states is something that needs playtesting to properly balance.

We must remember that most of us who are actively participating in making/suggesting features are diehard fans of the original, and while we may not find some of this extra micromanagement too much of a hassle, the average gamer would prolly have hard enough a time keeping his troops alive, and adding the possiblity of permantly loosing an experienced soldier outside of battle is going to be very fustrating to the average gamer.

I would have to differ though on how they'd perform with relation to your thought that too many psycho soldiers would unbalance the game. I figure as long as when in that state, its an even odds thing that they could hurt themselves, his team, or the aliens, it shouldn't be unbalanced.

Yeah, but given that they have very high reactions(To simulate the hair trigger effect), they'd make the perfect people to scout/overwatch ufo entryways. So if a player knows that he will definately get a highly reactive scout by pushing his troops too far, he might as well do so. But if we lower the chances that he can get a psycho scout to one in seven fatigue soldiers, he'd rather not push the system, but when push came to shove and one turned up, he might be able to use the psycho to great effect.

Point taken, yea its probably best then to limit the appearance of psychos, just in case. However, if a psycho would act like one who goes bezerk via an alien panic attack, you could theoretically have more of these, yet the detriment to them is the same as one who's gone bezerk...firing blindly most times.

Correct me if I'm wrong here on the psycho vs bezerked here...Even though the mechanic for them both to act the way they do is the same (seems that way to me at least), is the differentiation here that the bezerked fire blindly at anyone/nothing, whereas the psycho would fire at anything in his line-of-sight only (with similar odds of missing targets)?

Just want to be sure my train of thought is the same here, but I like where the discussion is going.

Hmm...Berserking as it happened in the original, had the berserked soldier firing randomly. It doesn't matter if he's surrounded by foes, friendlies or nothing at or, he'll just shoot out all his TUs

Quick look up on wikipedia on psychopath found this:

Research has shown that individuals with APD are indifferent to the threat of physical pain, and show no indications of fear when so threatened; this may explain their apparent disregard for the consequences of their actions, and their lack of empathy for the suffering of others.

Which makes sense for the no morale hits, and while it doesn't really support the higher reactions, if startled, I did assume a psychopath would shoot first and ask question later(Or not). As a result, a psychopath would shoot to kill when triggered, meaning that he would either taked aimed shots, or go full auto at whatever triggered his reaction.

The odds of them hitting are actually quite different, even if both are using the same kind of shots.Let's say snap shots...A beserking soldier would spin around in place and release three snap shots in totally random directions, kinda like you choosing for him to shoot three random places. If you're lucky, he'll either hit nothing or a enemy unit. A psycho will specifically aim his snap shots at a target, like you selected snap shot and placed the cursor over an enemy...

*Edit*Remember, psychopaths are very dangerous sane people... They just don't care for the wellbeing of other puny creatures besides themselves. Harnessed properly, they could make very dangerous spec ops. Remember Hannibal?

Heh good points, and thanks for digging up that reference, it actually helps flesh this out.

And as you said, I can see that definitely limiting these eventualities in a trooper is probably warranted. (Given that an average transport compliment of soldiers can be anywhere from 10-25 troopers, perhaps make the "psycho gene" appear in approximately 2-3 out of every 30 soldiers to limit them further).

About the bezerked snap shooting their shots, you say later that the psychopath would "aim his snap shots". I'd probably just make them aim their shots, since that too would limit them (consider too, for argument's sake, that every other psycho you have may not necessarily have good accuracy despite taking aimed shots, and you can never predict which one had the "psycho gene" until it came up) making them expend TUs just as fast or faster than the bezerked.

I like too that reference that they'd be indifferent to their surroundings. I mean sure, they can fire, but perhaps sometimes they won't. Granted as was noted, psychos would indeed make good scouts, but that's probably as good as they'll ever be on most occasions in terms of their role.

I do see what you mean about newbie players being frustrated by 'mental breakdown'. The easy solution to that is making 'mental breakdown' toggleable. Experienced players know better, so they should have to worry.

Now that we agree about that, here were my ideas on specific conditions.

Psychopaths - No morale problems, will fire on anything during reaction fire(including civvies and X-COM). Will not take alien prisoners(will kill wounded if near them). Personally I think they should appear about as often as the other conditions. Remember, they go into a rage(kill everything, sadistically if possible) very easily. Also, they can breakdown to uncontrollable pretty easy. These factors alone should advise caution.Trauma - Has a lot more morale problems, especially at night or when facing psi alien types. Easily spooked and will have much lower reactions from hesitation. These guys just do not do well in combat situations.Rage - These guys snap very easily if their morale is produced. When they snap, they kill whatever and anything that even looks alive. However they also blow stuff up and fire randomnly towards areas where they think things are alive. Do not expect much of a recovery for the rest of a mission.

I do see what you mean about newbie players being frustrated by 'mental breakdown'. The easy solution to that is making 'mental breakdown' toggleable. Experienced players know better, so they should have to worry.

Now that we agree about that, here were my ideas on specific conditions.

When we have to make a feature "toggleable", you know that it's not going in the right direction... Be let's leave that aide at the moment. Only playtesting will tell.

Psychopaths - No morale problems, will fire on anything during reaction fire(including civvies and X-COM). Will not take alien prisoners(will kill wounded if near them). Personally I think they should appear about as often as the other conditions. Remember, they go into a rage(kill everything, sadistically if possible) very easily. Also, they can breakdown to uncontrollable pretty easy. These factors alone should advise caution.

On the whole, I agree, but assuming that when you say "wounded" you mean stunned/unconcious, (I don't know how the programmers are going to handle that part yet, but in the original, stunned/unconcious aliens could only be killed by explosives or reviving them first, meaning user ntervention in actually required), this takes away alot of control from the player... I really don't like the idea of that(and of the soldier being uncontrollable for that matter...) As it is, I think making the Pyschos do reaction shots on friendlies and neutrals is good enough... Maybe have a certain chance that they will reaction shot during the players turn when an active soldier walks into their line of sight?

Trauma - Has a lot more morale problems, especially at night or when facing psi alien types. Easily spooked and will have much lower reactions from hesitation. These guys just do not do well in combat situations.

Now this I like, affect stats only, hence simple to implement, and adds a touch of unpredictability. Also, the effects are such that if you can spare the time to let the soldier recover, you'd happily do so...

Rage - These guys snap very easily if their morale is produced. When they snap, they kill whatever and anything that even looks alive. However they also blow stuff up and fire randomnly towards areas where they think things are alive. Do not expect much of a recovery for the rest of a mission.

Now this one... I really don't like... At least not without some moderation... Thing is, you are talking about taking control away from the player entirely for the rest of the game. Yeah, in reallife, berzerks like this do happen, but I'd think that people with such tendencies would be the first to be weeded out of an elite taskforce. Then there's the question of how to implement a rogue agent... Would he move first at the start of your turn? the end? During the alien's turn? Will he stay in one spot? move around? Can he be knocked out of this state?

I like the idea that if you take along soldiers that have been influenced too much of stress, they might have psyco problems, get traumatic issues, or maybe even faint/get sick/sit down and cry for a few turns/commit suicide. It could also start to affect their health if it goes on continuelly (even if it's just a little dossis of stress).

But those kinds of conditions would really be rare, as it isn't that often that the soldiers have no time to rest between missions.

Also, maybe you could evacuate soldiers along with non-millitary personel in battle? And maybe have wounded soldiers participate?

Some people say that dreams are a portal to the subconscious. If that is so, I am a very disturbed person.

I wholeheartedly disagree with adding even more than the existing numerous statistics to soldiers. Not that I have a problem with the various possibilities this idea opens up, but the player simply doesn't need to know about it. Yes we could make very very realistic soldiers by adding a dozen more stats to him but who is gonna bother looking at them once they clutter up the screen like that. Its a slippery slope.

I agree with Jake Drake, as soon as you start making decisions FOR the PLAYER in the name of realism you're moving in the wrong direction. Again, these are elite soldiers who have pysch screens and profiles, there is no way that you're going to let a pyschopath have a position of extreme responsilibility.

It wouldn't even be fun honestly having some 'pyschopath' on your team shooting everything, I'd just can him and the game would be frustrating. I want a game of tactics, not random events.

indeed, i also dislike micro-manegement. But a few things that - instead of just complicating things - connect a bound between the unit and the player, it will be worth it. Even if it might just be a little stress factor, players will have to make sure your soldiers are ok. It won't require that much, but the player will feel that he is needed to save these soldiers, not let them die of continious stress.

A little exessive i kno.

Some people say that dreams are a portal to the subconscious. If that is so, I am a very disturbed person.

It is not a random event. You know when these guys are starting to take too much stress and need a week or two of rest. If you take them in the field anyway, you assume the risk. No reason to not punish players for being stupid.

Also, psychological exams would make sure they were fine in normal combat situations, but these are aliens. Not only are they wierd looking aliens with overpowered weapons killing your buddies with impunity while your bullets bounce off htem, they have psionic powers. We have no idea the prolonged effects of psionic exposure, especially if you are scared. I imagine a psionic alien could pick up fear or teror or rage in an individual and try to amplify it, even if not powerful enough to mind control. And these conditions develop from sending your guys into combat when they should have rested for a couple weeks instead.

I agree that there should be some system to regulate how many missions that soldiers go on, and I feel that some pyschological trauma bar should be employed - as this does NOT take any decisions away from the player.

I think the system should follow a similar system to the morale in the battlescape, and should work with it in the battlescape, and independently in the geoscape. eg after a mission, if a level is reached, and the soldier has been predetermined to be susceptible to a certain type of mental instability, then there should be a chance that it will occur. For instance, person X has a psy damage level of 78% due to extreme stress in previous missions. As this is above HIS level (75%) there is a 1/10 chance / day that he will suffer a breakdown or whatever.

In the battlescape, this would then give way to another dice roll. When this breakdown is suffered, each successive mission, if morale is <50 there is ALSO the chance of a certain effect occurring (eg panic or something) . Possibly, we should remove any current stuff? Then, the morale would only some into play when a breakdown has occurred. Then, any current alien interference with your troops (panic etc) would only increase your psy damage?

Exactly. There is even a couple more ways to make this a decision of whether to risk someone or not.

You could set a max on the amount of psych damage after a single battle. I am going to say 30%.
Above a certain threshold(70 -80% sounds good) you might set off a condition. It is very likely in combat.
The threshold is reduced according to this progression of days without action:
1-4 = 1%
5-8 = 2%
9-12 = 4%
13-16 = 8%
17-20 = 16%

This means sometimes you'll have to give a guy a week or two rest before he can try another mission. Because here is waiting:

One Week = 10%
Two Weeks = 44%

If you wait two weeks, even a couple extremely stressfull missions will soon heal from the mind and the soldier will not be a risk.

The original already has this, soldiers lose the top notch of their abilities as they run out of energy...it takes time back in the base to restore it. Check it out, its in there and it uses the stats that already exist within the game. If you go from one mission to the next mission to the next consistently....then they don't operate as well. Also consider that the Skyranger returns to base straight away after a mission, this could also give them time to rest.

Its good as it is, these guys are professioinal soldiers who are the elite of the elite...they're not going to go psycho on you and to be honest...anyone that wants to be a SEAL/X-corps trooper already runs marathons and the like...after a few hours rest, there isn't any reason why they can't fight another 10 minute raid. Ask yourself this...what does it add to the game that isn't there? Not much, complexity shouldn't be an end unto itself I'd say.

LIke I said, these guys are prepared for anything 'on Earth'. No one has fought wierd aliens that turn your buddies into zombies, ash, and puppets. Also they are fighting a battle where their weapons are barely effective and the enemy seems to outnumber them 1000 to a 1. They also realize if they fail then everything they ever loved or care about will be turned into alien food or puppets of some computer.

All I am saying is if any situation would be kind of trying, this one would be. Also, half of the elites in the USMC are already half psycho, it would not be a big step. Also, who knows what kind of psychological suggestions a psionics user could use to make the best killing machines from Earth go nuts. Remember, we are not just fightin their plasma, its their minds too.

Also, this is hardly energy, it is the fact they are going day-in-day-out in what is always an uphill battle. They don't lose stats, they lose the whole package. Energy is in missions, pscyhological damage is all the time, so don't push too hard or they will snap.

I'd say no? That doesn't sound fun at all. You argue that psionics might make them go crazy, we already have psionics making them go crazy in the mission. I also don't agree that the guys who make it into elite spec ops are sociopaths...in fact I think that they are anything but sociopaths, the screening process is intense and pysch profiling is part of it all. The fact that each member has to depend on the other means that these guys are utterly sure that they can depend on the other members of a team. Pyschological problems or individual 'quirks' don't fit into an elite commando group like they might in a mercenary unit.

Your argument doesn't hold honestly. Elite commandos wouldn't go nuts when fighting an uphill battle, every aspect of their training reinforces the fact that they are always facing nearly insurmountable odds. The guys who are spec ops see challenging missions as a chance to succeed...What you're talking about is bascially instituting random effects into the game, its not fun. Its honestly not fun to have your best guys taken out of combat because they're pyschologically not sound. Thats not a heroic way to go, its frustrating.

These people are fighting a war for the survival of our species, the weak and pyschologically unsound have no place among their ranks...each member needs to depend completely on the other. Gameplay wise and fluff wise, individual quirks and pyschological problems don't have any merit. You seem to equate an elite unit of commandos with a group of mercenaries who have been rejected from the normal military. Our X-corps troopers aren't going to run into combat with two pistols because they're 'ambidextrous', they're going to use standard issue rifles. They're not going to make their own choices and start blasting everything because they're 'pyschopathic' and they're not going to 'freak out' because they saw an alien and then killed it. These aren't normal people, they're the elite, they were picked for X-corp because they can handle the strain and if they couldn't then training would have washed them out.

Gameplay wise this doesn't connect the player to his soldiers, it distances him. They aren't there when you need them, or your favourite character has now randomly become a pyschopath. Given the stigma that mental illness has with our society you are going to be turning people's favourite characters that they use the most into people with pyschological problems. Its not fun, and it adds complexity to the game that detracts from the overall idea behind its premise. We're here to kill aliens and build bases, research tech and help our species survive, not micromanage some inane amount of 'pyschological trauma' that these people feel.

If we implemented your idea, then why aren't we taking into account the pyschological trauma that the scientists are going through...what about the pilots, what about the engineers, what about the people who refuel the planes? These are all people under incredible stress...but somehow they never break down, they get enough sleep etc etc. This isn't in the game beyond the extent that it is for three reasons:

1) Its not fun to micromanage peoples sleep cycles. We want a player to be able to use his favourite commandos whenever he needs them. If we wanted to help people live their lives and deal with pyschological troubles, I'd play the Sims.
2) Implementing your idea removes the element of imagination from a player; their favourite sniper who just had a bad mission is now a pyschotic who runs around like a berzerker. You've taken a character that the player was attached to turned them 180 degrees around into a frustrating disappointment.
3) It doesn't add anything to the game that isn't there. We already need to rest our troops minimally, its fun and you can notice its effects, but it doesn't interfere with gameplay...it adds to it in a minimal way. 'Oh, I need to rest my guys 5 hours while that plane is refueling'. That is the player getting involved in the game.

What does the player think when we implemented your idea?...*Loads up the battlescape*..."Damnit...why isn't Robert Robertson in my squad? He was there last mission...#$@#*&$ he's a pyschopath now because I used him in the last five missions? Screw this thats lame. He went from a sniper to a complete sociopath in less than a month?"

The reason why we played XCOM is because we wanted a tactical combat simulator with cool technology, research and a cool theme. We're not going to play Xenocide to mess around with babysitting people's sleep cycles and pyschological treatment schedule. Even expert players will see your idea as micromanagement that adds little and removes fun from the game.

I still think that, no matter what might be investigated along these lines for its plausibility (functionally its a mess - the up shot to it is there seems to be a lot of good story going into these ideas)...Just to reiterate what I said before, functionally, no matter what kind of down time you introduce for men (wounded, overly tired, mentally scarred), it should work just like that roster showed us..."Oh that's why I'm one man short on my Skyranger - He decided to hit on the nurses the lucky bastard."

Bam, you look at the soldier screen and sure enough see 'Wounded' next to his name. Most of us wouldn't take off half cocked with our transports full of men without being sure its actually full of men. (although it sounds like one of NKF's challenges to me Fill up one transport full of guys, your stuck with those same guys for better or worse through the whole game)

All is needed I think, regardless for the reason for the downtime, is a blurb about it next to the soldier's name on the roster and expected recovery date. I trust we could do the rest ourselves while we waited on them.

New replacement guy gets point I think Sometimes by the time I've had someone come off the wounded list, the replacement's been doing better than they had.

The thing is, that most people like managing things that are fun, research, manufacturing, base development. Those are all cool and interesting things for the player to spend his time on. Having to click into the base screen to check to see if the game has removed your favourite soldiers before every combat mission isn't fun. Its not fun to even have the possbility that your soldiers aren't in Skyranger. Add this to the fact that it is also not fun to have your favourite guys removed from play based on someone's arbitrary concept of 'pyschological trauma' and you have another two points where it just doesn't work well when implemented into the game.

Very few people will like this feature, but then very few people also liked MOO III and that was a game where they tried to include everything and then automate it. What happened, you had things happening for reasons that most never understood and the game had moved away from a fun galatic conquest and research game into the tedious 'realistic' micromanagement of nothing or everything at all.

What it would come down to is that the players who trusted the AI would just let it handle everything and would never even notice this 'feature'. They'd just load up their skyranger and send it off...either not caring or just not worried that they're not using the units the used before. The players who like to know what is going on will be driven nuts by this 'feature'. They can't control when their units are undergoing 'pyschological trauma' and it is consistently occuring to those units that they like and use the most.

Sure it sounds sort of interesting in concept but it'd be so hard to implement so that its fun and not a negative aspect of the game that we could do other, cooler things.

this isn't really micromanegment on a great scale - not any more then attaching armour to soldiers would. Assigning men and equiptment to a craft is more demanding then checking your soldiers for stress - and removing them from the list. It's not like you have to choice what symptoms you are expecting, how the treatment should go, what facilities to use, and how many nurses to assign to the task (max 255 ). Just click - remove - done.

But really - how often do you think they'll get stressed at this scale? Hardly ever, unless the aliens decide to come with a massive assault with several crafts at once.

Some people say that dreams are a portal to the subconscious. If that is so, I am a very disturbed person.

I'm not suggesting soldiers snap on the second mission, just that you can't send them on five missiosn in a row where most of the squad is eliminated. Remember, they only start developing the potential for psych problems whenever they have a 'lot of trauma', i.e 70%+. THe max trauma for any mission is 30 and most successful missions should be 1 to 5, depending on the wierdness(psionic attacks are always wierd until they wield psionics themselves). This means by that time you should know that you need to let the guy rest. Its a risk you take and know about.

Also, here is some of the interface info.

Its only one extra bar, "Psychological Fatigue".

After every mission you would see a breakdown showing how much psych fatigue each soldier gained and what their current psychological fatigue is: it would even be color coded 0-30(green), 31-39(yellow), 40-69(red),70+(flashing red).

Whenever you hit the intercept button and chose a skyranger, it would first bring up the loadout(popup) so you could see if you wanted to keep it or change it(weapons, armour, soldiers, etc.). Next to each soldier would be their 'psychological fatigue', armour type, and maybe seat number on the carrier. So you would know if you wanted to rotate them out or not.

But really - how often do you think they'll get stressed at this scale? Hardly ever, unless the aliens decide to come with a massive assault with several crafts at once.

Exactly, although towards middle/end of the game I would like to see really tough battles. See if we could work those stress bars all the way up. Maybe you should be able to hire 'nurses' for the base. Provides a morale boost in missions(or at least Energy increase )

Plus, if in accordance with the autoequipping stuff to soldiers via some templating system, and if there were some way to assign 2nd pick and 3rd picks with relation to a spot on a ship, you can kind of also do away with the concept of always having to double check that a ship's complement of troops is met. It draws from your available pool at the base and puts them there for you after it had withdrawn any wounded present.

Its a couple less screens to have to double check and granted, as much as I hate too much micromanagement, there's still that need to get in there and investigate what's going on to make changes manually.

It really also boils down to how they handle the flow of troops as far as how you buy them that makes some of these ideas worth while too. If its like how the first game handled recruits, I'd probably think these ideas are better suited to higher difficulty levels. On the other hand, if its gradual in the way Apocolypse handled soldier availability, it still comes out sounding challenging looking at it from a difficulty and/or late game perspective.

Ok lets run with this for one second: What happens when your soldier does go pyschotic?

If we want realism...then a soldier who goes pyschotic is done for the game. In the interests of realism that soldier would never fight again, he'd be a threat to the lives of the team members that need him and they would never let him fight again.

If we don't want realism then why are you even considering the addition of feats designed to model 'realistic' factors.

You're introducing RPG elements into a game that wasn't designed to have them. We already model fatigue within the game, if you fight multiple battles in a row then you see performance drop. What you are suggesting is the addition of feats under another name. If you want to up the effects of fatigue that is already modeled in the game than that is an option. But I don't see why you think that is ncessary, especially considering that the V1 isn't even done yet.

We should make the game more challenging by increasing the difficulty of the CORE game...tactical combat, battles on the geoscape, base development and research. Not by adding more micromanagement to the game.

I think he said he abandoned the feat system concept. From what I've been getting from this is though (correct me if I'm wrong shwick) is that, if anything, it seems to be a reversal in terms of effect, some pluses (how they perform - minor sort of improvements depending how you look at it) which can quickly turn against you if your not keeping track.

I just want to be clear though that the premise sounds appealing in terms of potential outcomes, but its the 'keeping track' part that has me a little worried. If there isn't a reasonable way of keeping track at a glance for the deassigning of troops who've become questionable early on - before they've gotten too messed (even if it were like a 'hot key' thing for quick swappages), I think we'll find ourselves staring at and scrolling through soldier profiles adnauseum again.

I just want to be clear though that the premise sounds appealing in terms of potential outcomes, but its the 'keeping track' part that has me a little worried. If there isn't a reasonable way of keeping track at a glance for the deassigning of troops who've become questionable early on - before they've gotten too messed (even if it were like a 'hot key' thing for quick swappages), I think we'll find ourselves staring at and scrolling through soldier profiles adnauseum again.

If anything I am hoping this is their main concern with V1. I would be so happy if they kept the originals graphics and just fixed up the unfun portions of the interface. Agreed, this or any idea like this only works if the interface is smooth enough.

I think he said he abandoned the feat system concept. From what I've been getting from this is though (correct me if I'm wrong shwick) is that, if anything, it seems to be a reversal in terms of effect, some pluses (how they perform - minor sort of improvements depending how you look at it) which can quickly turn against you if your not keeping track.

Correct. I even thought of an additional way to explore psychological stress. This concept I will call stress tolerance.

Just as there are problems whenever you stress a system too long and beyond its safe limit, there are also benefits you push a system beyond its comfort and force it to operate under some stress. For example, new college students may feel a bit overwhelmed when on the third week all their classes have tests and multi-page papers due. After a time these students get used to this level of stress and it no longer phases them. Whenever more stressful events come along that would have formerly destroyed them, they can now face them.

The Stress Tolerance number would be marked by a vertical bar at the number along the Psychological Stress bar. This bar marks an important point, what feels like normal and even comfortable stress for this soldier. Whenever psych stress is at or lower than this number the rate of relief is doubled(very useful when its built up). Also, whenever your stress tolerance hits certain milestones, your character will be less phased and stressed by stuff that most people would find stressfull. They are special ops and adjust to it, meaning plasma fire, even psionics does not really phase them after a while. Now for some math intensive stuff:

Tolerance never atrohpies because its no fun if your soldier loses his edge because it was a slow month.

If Current Psychological Stress>Tolerance than the amount tolerance is increased by is:(Current Stress - Tolerance)/KK will be a constant, I am thinking something like 100, but the number is open to discussion. This increase is calculated each day before stress is relieved.

Also, the Damage POint, or when you have to worry about psychological problems, is either a minimum of 70% or double the current tolerance. Since getting a psych tolerance of 35 takes a while, you will probably have a DP of 70 for many months. However once your tolerance reaches 51 it is impossible for your soldier to go crazy. By then though the soldier will be able to face a [Battleship] full of [Ethereals],[Mutons], and [Reapers] with only a stun baton and have no fear(probalby not survive, but no fear).

In terms of a simple system that stops people going "Apocalypse", fifty battles in one day, I think you're overthinking things.
Rather than having a myriad selection of effects punishing you for aliens, simply have a fatigue stat, updated only at the end of each mission. Every turn the battle drags on for, the fatigue stat is increased by something like 0.5% for beginner, up to around 2.5%/3% in Superhuman, so a three turn maximum small scout battle won't be nearly as harrowing as a forty turn bug hunt through a Cloak base.

Outside of combat, every hour - including those spent resting in your cushy Condor, fatigue decreases by 1%, but take a fatigued unit into combat, and all stats but health will be reduced by the fatigue percentage. For a rookie, 1% off an accuracy of 50 isn't much of a problem, but a highly strung sharpshooter tired of all the fighting will really suffer even with low levels of stress.

To avoid fatigue and to cop out for critical soldiers you didn't notice were simply comatose, simply have the Condor and recovery zones as a "fatigue free" zone, and automatically order occupants in order of fatigue so the freshest are the first into battle, whilst you can leave the "last grey on the map" hunt to expendable rookies whilst your command team sits in the Condor drinking brews.

Finally, increases in medical tech could double fatigue recovery, and for the soldier on the go, medikit stimulants could actually have some use beyond stun recovery by temporarily dropping fatigue by 1 point per application, but similarly adding 1 point extra to fatigue every turn per application as well (Yes, overdosing on coffee is a bad thing that will mess you up).

To prevent "cheating the system" by stimming someone on the very last turn to recover them entirely, on mission completion, everybody, even those who never left the ship, gains one final turn of fatigue.

For normal units and tired units that napped on the Condor the whole time, this has no real effect and is swiftly eliminated by the time they get back from base. For stim-junkies, this could potentially send them into a caffeine coma that lasts for days. Shots are still calculated from total TUs, so beyond a certain amount you just won't be bothered to even shoot anymore.

Since injury recovery is obscenely long anyway, I can't really see the point of introducing fatigue penalties for wounds, so eh.

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As for the idea of mental stress, again with the over-complicating; It would probably be far easier just to go by number of berserks and panics rather than simple turns.

Losing a soldier after you just torched fifty aliens using a single round from your IC assault cannon is obviously going to have less of a mental detrimental effect than it does on the person who accidentally killed that soldier, was shot in both legs, landed on by an exploding Cyberdisk and spent the entire battle sobbing in a ball in the corner.

Therefore a simple method for measuring psychological stress is simply to add the same 0.5-2.5% every time the unit panics or goes berserk, which is how the game already remarks on extreme battlefield stresses anyway.

High morale and inherent bravery will support people from mental trauma as a "buffer", making high ranking troops even more vital with all the panicky rookies taking instant morale damage whenever they see an alien (I believe this cheerfully encompasses most of the mentioned ideas).
With this, Twitch the 10 Bravery crybaby is more likely to suffer than Lord High Commander Nightmare von Kicksassalot with his 90 Bravery and collection of alien heads.

For each Panic attack, the percent gained is blue, to the right of this red portions of the bar are added for each berserker rage.

For each 1% of blue bar section, the soldier is 1% more likely to panic than go berserk, and of course, 1% more likely to go berserk with each percent of the red bar - People who spend a lot of time coping for their problems by raging are going to spend more and more time doing it than people who are prone to freezing in terror or running away, and with about 50% advantage of one over the other, such behaviour should be "set", making that person purely a berserker or purely a crybaby until they rest up and relax awhile, get some therapy and so on.

This mental damage, being slower to disperse than physical wear and tear typically would go down 0.5% a day, so in beginner, a one off rookie panic attack would be forgotten about over a nice cup of tea, in Superhuman, two turns of panicked behaviour can easily set the poor rookie up with nightmares for the best part of a week, and they have to fly into mop up an ethereal base soon too. Oh dear oh dear.

As a notable aside, physical fatigue in this model would indeed contribute to mental fatigue, as a 50% fatigued soldier would start out at 50 morale, and as low as 5 bravery, and one who's been forced to every mission and hit 100 fatigue can simply be attributed to having a nervous breakdown (and quite rightly too).

In addition to fatigue moral penalty however, mental damage also contributes itself to morale and bravery - the two mental stats, for a double dose.

So, what would happen if this bar were to reach 100%? It depends.

If the bars are mostly even, then stress induced mood swings might be the effect, simply have a random chance of either panicking or berserking in combat even if morale is high (though wish -100% morale, it takes a lot of officer bonuses to pull that off), but these randomly induced fits don't improve morale but do increase mental stress further - they are simply symptoms, and the battlefield is far from helpful.

If the bar is predominately red, then emotional retardation, paranoia, and uncontrolled fits of rage are in order. The soldier gains morale from any kill they make, friend or foe, loses none from friendly deaths, but gains nothing from allied kills or officer bonuses. In addition, they have a fairly large chance of berserking each turn forfieting their turn to start emptying ammunition at any target nearby and raise their mental stress too, even using grenades if they had them in their hands.

Finally, if the bar is largely blue, then shellshock is the big problem. Explosions, gunfire, enemies, everything gives a good chance of panic, morale losses are huge, and panics cause even more mental damage.

Yes, none of the mental disorders grant any particular advantage, though why they should is beyond me, you're not supposed to be breaking your soldiers' brains.
The only cure for these conditions is simply R&R, X-Corps' already present hospital/psych ward will slowly reduce the mental damage and help work through it.

As should hopefully be apparent, I'd like to restate that fatigue levels are NOT capped at 100. Fatigue and Stress can both climb well above, though stats remain at 0 rather than sink below.

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In summary:

Fatigue: Gain 0.5%-2.5% per mission turn. Lose 0.75%(SH)-1% per hour. All stats are reduced by fatigue percentage whilst in combat. Stimulants can temporarily lower fatigue, but increase the gain of fatigue by just as much.

Stress: Gain 0.5%-2.5% per panic and beserk. Lose 0.25%(SH)-.05 per day. Bravery and Morale are reduced by Stress percentage also. The amount of one type of fit will help determine future hits along with higher stress fits:

So what does everyone think? Sorry it's wordy, but I've kept everything simple, which is how UFO should be, the most technical being a multiple "panic/berserk" bar.
I'm open to suggestions, questions and comments. ^-^

in response to sinscale17's post:
Nicely thought out, addition of at most two stats bar, no obvious exploits, and increases the realism of the game... Although I'd still prefer that extremely fatigue/stressed troopers will get swapped automatically assuming there's a replacement handy...